U.S. to
seek social media usernames and details from all visa applicants

The
State Department wants to require all U.S.
visa applicants to submit their social media usernames, previous
email addresses and phone numbers, vastly expanding the Trump
administration's enhanced vetting of potential immigrants and
visitors. In documents to be published in Friday's Federal Register,
the department said it wants the public to comment on the proposed
new requirements, which will affect nearly 15 million foreigners who
apply for visas to enter the U.S. each year.

… The new rules would apply to virtually all
applicants for immigrant and non-immigrant visas. The department
estimates it would affect 710,000 immigrant visa applicants and 14
million non-immigrant visa applicants, including those who want to
come to the U.S. for business or education, according to the
documents.

SpaceX has a
green light from the FCC to launch a network of thousands of
satellites blanketing the globe with broadband. And you won’t have
too long to wait — on a cosmic scale, anyway. Part of the
agreement is that SpaceX launch half of its proposed satellites
within six years.

… The proposed service, which will be called
Starlink,
was opposed by several existing satellite operators like OneWeb and
Spire. They’re rightly concerned that another operator in space —
especially one that wants to launch thousands of satellites — will
crowd both spectrum and orbit.

… SpaceX eventually plans to launch 12,000 of
the things, but this authorization is for the high-altitude group of
4,425; a separate authorization is necessary for the remaining
number, since they’ll be operating at a different altitude and
radio frequency.

“JSTOR has made its free read-only access more
flexible. Now, anyone with a MyJSTOR account can read up to six
journal articles online every 30 days. Designed primarily for people
who are not affiliated with an institution, JSTOR’s read-only
service offers a way for independent researchers to explore more than
2,000 scholarly journals. Need access? Sign up for a free
account.”

… the Excel team has spent the last few months
adding new machine learning-powered features to the application and
starting today, Office 365 users who opt in to the Office
Insiders program will get to experience the first crop of these
new features.

The general idea here is to make Excel smart
enough to understand some of your entries and offer you additional
information. For now, this applies to geographical data like the
names of cities, states and countries (but also Zip codes), as well
as stocks.

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About Me

I live in Centennial Colorado. (I'm not actually 100 years old., but I hope to be some day.) I'm an independant computer consultant, specializing in solving problems that traditional IT personnel tend to have difficulty with... That includes everything from inventorying hardware & software, to converting systems & data, to training end-users. I particularly enjoy taking on projects that IT has attempted several times before with no success. I also teach at two local Universities: everything from Introduction to Microcomputers through Business Continuity and Security Management. My background includes IT Audit, Computer Security, and a variety of unique IT projects.